Secure storage and fuzzy query over encrypted databases

Abstract

Outsourcing database has attracted much attention recently due to the emergence of Cloud Computing. However, there are still two problems to solve, 1) how to encipher and protect the sensitive information before outsourcing while keeping the database structure, and 2) how to enable better utilization of the database like fuzzy queries over the encrypted information. In this paper we propose a new solution based on format-preserving encryption, which protects the privacy of the sensitive data and keeps the data structure as well in the encrypted database. We also show how to perform fuzzy queries over such enciphered data. Specially, our scheme supports fuzzy queries by simply exploiting the internal storing and query mechanism of the databases, thus the influence on both the inner relation of databases and the construction of applications are minimized. Evaluation indicates that our scheme is able to efficiently perform fuzzy query on encrypted database. © 2013 Springer-Verlag.